Number of input/output captures of a Delta 2496

maybe someone has experience or/and the knowledge to answer my question (unfortunately I'm lacking both of it, that's the reason for this post).

I rebuilt my studio to have a better and cleaner situation in that room, and with that I replaced my Lexicon Omega Studio (USB) with a PCI card, M-Audio Delta 2496 Audiophile. A really fine thing, seems rather professional to me, for my needs it fits perfectly.

Now I have that situation:

All samplers and Mics run into a 22 mixer.

Mixer is connected to the 2 channels of the 2496's IN.

2496's OUT goes back to the mixer, from here to control room/headphones.

Works like a charm, really fine. All recording, playing back works and sounds great for my ears.

BUT.... now my question. In Ardour/Mixbus or -more precisely- in JACK the 2496 shows 10 input captures and (I think) 4 output captures. But the 2496 has only 2 inputs and two outputs !

ALSA uses the ICE1712 driver.

Is it conditioned by the use of too much brandy that I see things (more than) twice ? Is it my age that masquerades certain stuff larger than it is in reality ?

Or... maybe there is a technical background. Maybe someone else has a 2496 and could tell his experience in that case.
I was wondering... maybe due to the fact that BEFORE I switched to the PCI interface, I was running a USB device. Could that be an explanation for my observance ?

Have you got the envy24control utility? You'll see 8 PCM outs here. These eig.ht software outs are just a mixer stuck in front of the physical stereo outs. You can, if you want, connect different apps to different PCM streams before finally mixing down to stereo. Most people probably won't find a use for that and will only need to use two (any two: they're all the same) panned hard left and right respectively.

However you should do all your mixing in Ardour. Connect audio app outputs to an Ardour stereo buss, or to several busses if the app offers several outputs - and don't forget to disconnect the default connections to the system outs. Don't add FX in the app - do it in Ardour instead.

The advantage of this is that you have just one place, the Ardour mixer, where you can control volume, panning, FX plugins, inserts, a global reverb setting, a high pass safety filter, etc etc. Did I mention automation? Yup, that too :)

You'll need to use something to restore all the connections when you open a project. There is something built in to Jack but I'm not sure if it's ready for use (I don't think every audio app supports it). Instead I use a bunch of bash scripts and a little app called aj-snapshot to load projects.

It seems like a lot of the M-Audio Delta cards use the same audio processor chips with the biggest differences between the cards being the number of physical connectors they have. The audio processor on your card can handle more streams than you have connectors.